The Test Drive: Chhandomay on Sun Product Reviews

Friday Oct 03, 2008

In a second
review
of the Sun Fire X4150 Server,
MC Brown discusses its "sweet spot" for current buyers.

MC traces how purchases evolved from small add-on servers, to massive
server infrastructure, and now to efficient uses of hardware through
consolidation. With this in mind, MC said, "Whether the X4150 hits the sweet spot
depends on your point of view, but I'm finding it
really hard not to justify a machine with this flexibility to anybody
who wants a decent machine."

Regarding specific features, MC complimented the X4150 by saying, "At 1U high you could fit a lot of
computing power into a cabinet. With two quad-core Xeons there's plenty
of CPU power, and 64GB of RAM gives you plenty of memory to play with.
The 8 SAS drives are also enough for you to have a system disk, and a 5
or 6 disk RAID configuration of your choice with one or two hot spares."

MC noted
that with this "wealth of potential" in options, he tried several
different configurations, but his favorite was using the X4150 as a
consolidation box.

Overall, MC concluded that the X4150 provides a high level of
flexibility, specifically noting, "flexibility like that in the modern
datacenter is a must." Using the server's
variety of options, "you can choose a variety of
configurations to suit your needs, and if you decide to change your
mind, you can do so without changing your hardware, just redeploy it."

Thursday Sep 25, 2008

How many
times have you had your meticulously planned travel itinerary go astray
because of a system "glitch"? I can remember quite a few times during
the past year alone...

That's going to change!!! Yeay!!!

Well, at least for the glitches that are attributed to FAA. They have
upgraded their legacy internal business systems to a new open-systems
server and storage infrastructure from us.

Our OpenSolaris/ZFS/Sun Fire
server/Thumper storage solutions,
which feature built-in, state-of-the-art virtualization capability, is
the key building block for the new infrastructure at FAA.
And ZFS
is playing a major role in their data centers.

ZFS won
InfoWorld's BOSSIE award
as the best open source storage platform

"The FAA uses a large quantity
of Sun Solaris servers in a variety of
configurations to support some of our noncritical business
applications," Andy Isaksen, manager of the Communications
Infrastructure Engineering Team for NADIN and architect of the original
mainframe system, said. "ZFS is being
used on at least one service
within the Air Traffic Organization Enterprise Data Center."

The server tested well for
cooling fans and energy consumption, as well
as software and application suites. The server was
loaded with Solaris 10 OS and
Michael found navigation straight-forward
and
logical.

For the application suite, Michael called the pre-loaded options
a "veritable roll-call of major open
source applications (for which Sun
has often had major developmental input)."

Michael commented that the equivalent products from competitors, such
as the IBM x3850 and a Dell R900, "are
both 4 RU machines (the Sun Fire
is just 2 RU in size), yet Sun manages to pack just as much inside the
case."

Conclusion from the review:
The benchmark results for the Sun Fire X4450
are "the best we have
seen in high-end servers -- particularly the
Sungard score -- although we cannot claim to have tested such a machine
with specs quite like this before."

Wednesday Aug 20, 2008

In an
ongoing evaluation,
Martin MC Brown of ComputerWorld wrote about some
comparative performance testing he has completed on Sun Fire X4150
server.

MC is quite enamored with the X4150, "The
box is very powerful for what
is a single U high pizza box. The eight cores and potential for up to
64GB of RAM make this a small powerhouse of computing, even before you
include the storage that you could fit into the same space."

In his testing, MC ran a series of web applications with the goal of
creating real-world performance examples. For comparisons sake, he put
the X4150 up against a T1000. "What I
was really looking to compare was
the power usage of the box between the T1000, which is a low power,
low-MHz, but many threaded box against the multiple cores of the X4150
in terms of the response times and performance," noted MC.

MC also examined the differences in performance between ZFS (RAID-Z)
and RAID-5 finding, "RAID-5 showed a
small benefit in favor of the
hardware, but by less than 5% in real terms. This is impressive, both
for the hardware, and the efficacy of RAID-5."

Overall, MC found that the difference in performance of the X4150 is
evident. He is still tallying up the results, but promises to cover
other aspects of the X4150 in upcoming posts later this week.

Wednesday Jul 30, 2008

LinkedIn,
the largest professional networking site with more than 25 million
users, has added
Sun's MySQL Enterprise database
subscription to their
existing infrastructure of Sun SPARC
Enterprise servers running Solaris
10.

"LinkedIn has continued to see
incredible growth among professionals spanning all sectors looking to
build and leverage their networks. As a leader in our field, we are
committed to providing the best service to our users, and a web
experience that meets members expectations and that starts with IT,"
said Jean-Luc Vaillant, Chief Technology Officer, LinkedIn. "The
combination of Sun and MySQL means quicker access to the latest
innovation in an open and reliable environment and this saves me time
and money."

Monday Jul 21, 2008

Sun is providing
the technology platform to NBC Universal for its Olympic web site, NBCOlympics.com, during the
network's coverage of the 2008 Olympics.

Powered by 160 Sun Fire X4450
and Sun Fire X4150 servers,
NBC's online coverage of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing will set a
new standard in delivering digital content to viewers with live
streaming of events, video archives of completed events, blogs, live
chat, athlete profiles and many other unique features.

Olympic fans will have access to approximately 2,200 total hours of
live streaming of 25 different sports!

(Image courtesy : NBC)

Sun's infrastructure solutions
will be working extra hard to make sure you've a pleasant
web-experience of the 2008 Olympics.

Monday Jul 14, 2008

This week's
print issue of InformationWeek has a very positive review
of Sun Fire
X4150 server.

Jeff Ballard examined this 1U powerhouse and wrote, "The Sun Fire X4150
delivers the goods with 16 DIMM slots, three PCI-e slots, and dual
quad-core Intel Harpertown processors. The X4150 supports up to 64 GB
of memory and sports four Gigabit Ethernet slots, double what is
offered by the Dell 1950, IBM x3550, and HP DL360."

Jeff provided an excellent overview of the product, digging deep into
the key features
of processor, memory and expansion capabilities of the
X4150. He wrote, "Sun crams a lot of gear into this 1U
device. To put
it in perspective, a standard rack can hold as many as 40 of these
servers. Thus, a rack full of the
units as we tested would give you a
whopping 320 processor cores, 320 hot-swappable hard drives, 640 DIMM
slots, 120 PCI-E slots, and 160 Gigabit Ethernet connections."

Jeff's conclusion: "With all of its
disks configured as RAID 60, the
X4150 would make an excellent compact database server, video server,
virtualization platform, or other data-critical machine. Even without
its disks, the
X4150 is a powerhouse of performance in a small profile."

Monday Jul 07, 2008

Saudi
Airlines, the national carrier for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,
started with a single aircraft in 1945. The airlines have undergone
huge growth since then, and today they operate 139 aircrafts serving
more than 13 million passengers every year. To manage growth and ensure
business continuity, the airlines has turned to Sun for a complete
systems upgrade that includes new Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000, T5120 and
V490
servers as well as storage
and back-up
solutions.

(Image courtesy: Saudi Airlines)

Muhammed Al Bakri, ERP Project
Director and Chief Systems Engineering and Technology, Saudi Airlines,
commented, "Sun's
solution for SAP was convincing; Sun provided an integrated tested
solution that can be deployed quickly enough to help reduce cost and
risk, improve availability, scalability, security, flexibility, and
manageability. The solution is performance-driven, ensures business
continuity and has the capacity to accommodate a wide variety of
business applications."

Wednesday Jun 25, 2008

Paul Murphy
of ZDNet dispels
many myths surrounding Sun Ray.
He has busted all
the top myths people put forward to argue that it's not as good as a
PC. He found that most of the more widely cited negatives for Sun Rays
are pure nonsense.

According to Paul, Sun Rays are not the right answer for a hobbyist who
wants to play games or pretend to program -- but for large
organizations the negatives simply don't hold up. One of the lessons
that can be learned from productivity change in the telecom industry is
that centrally provisioned services can be extremely attractive to
consumers provided that the service provider does not impose artificial
controls on what the user can do with the device.

We have many large organizations
in different verticals who save a bundle by deploying this thin client
solution of ours. Here
is how Denver Health does it, and here
is how Kuwait's Savings and Credit Bank saves money.

So why don't you run a pilot for Sun Ray in your organization and see
for yourself how it stacks up.

Wednesday Jun 18, 2008

Reliant
Security provides information security products and services that
help merchants secure and protect the confidentiality and integrity of
a client's information.

Needless to say, they have to comply with complex security requirements
such as Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards. At the same time, they
have to reduce merchants' cost to comply with the security requirements
so that Reliant's offerings
remain inexpensive as well as easy to deploy and manage.

Reliant was looking to create a
single security solution to replace combined solutions from multiple
vendors. They chose Sun, and today Reliant Security depends on OpenSolaris, Solaris 10 and Sun servers to run its
PCI compliant information security products.

"The
level of enterprise customer service support that comes with Sun is
exponentially better than what you get with other open source products
and solutions. When you compare Sun with vendors such as Red Hat or
Novell in the platform space, the difference is like night and day,"
said Richard Newman, president and cofounder of Reliant Security.

Monday May 26, 2008

On the
heels of a good InfoWorld review
of Sun Fire X4150 server,
AnandTech has published a positive review of
Sun Fire X4450 server.

In this detailed 8-page review,
AnandTech essentially concluded that X4450 is a 2U server that
offers the same features and performance as the 4U servers from
competition. In their tests, they found X4450 has better
serviceability, 17% to 26% more power efficiency over a comparable
solution, 7% to 18% better in performance, lower 3-year TCOs (in 2
different ways of measurement), and great pricing via Try-&-Buy
program.

The reviewer, Johan De Gelas, has best summed it up in the conclusion:

"IBM and HP better take notice: Sun has
thrown down the proverbial
gauntlet. We would be happy to review HP and IBM systems, but we think
it will be very difficult to beat the Sun Fire X4450 ...

Unless HP, Dell, or IBM comes
out quickly with an appropriate reply, we
feel Sun has a winner here. Sun's aggressive pricing helps, but it is
the exceptional hardware design that makes the difference. This 2U
server is able to deliver the same performance and 95% of the
expandability of the 4U competition, and it is easier to maintain than
any of those bulky boxes are. We experienced it first hand, as we are
used to working with Dell boxes. Lower power, a pretty face, but
especially the "try and buy program" top it off: the Sun X4450 is ahead
of the pack. Here's to hoping this will create a new wave of innovation
throughout the x86 server world."

"Sun has developed a
1U chassis design that can handle an impressive number of drives, yet
also provide for a standard two-socket Intel-based mainboard and the
company's signature four gigabit Ethernet interfaces, not to mention a
relatively advanced Lights-Out Management coprocessor," said
Paul.

In his evaluation, Paul did make competitive references,
"it's a very real competitor to HP's
ProLiant DL360 G5, IBM's x3550,
and Dell's PowerEdge 1950 III. In fact, the fit and finish of the X4150
are generally better than the rest of the field's and far ahead in
local storage." Paul was also impressed with the X4150's wealth
of
built-in features.

In MySQL and LAMP stack testing,
Sun Fire X4150 server performed
extremely well. It was 12 minutes faster
than Dell system for the
disk-intensive sql-bench tests running on MySQL 5.0.22 database. Even
in less disk-intensive tests, X4150 came out at least 50 percent faster
than the Dell unit.

In conclusion, Paul summed up his evaluation by saying, "the most
suitable roles for the Sun Fire X4150 will be in database, Web serving,
and virtualization tasks. In these spaces, the X4150 provides
significant bang for the buck in nearly all respects."

Wednesday May 14, 2008

Back in August 2006, SmugMug posted a very detailed unflattering review
of T1000 running Ubuntu Linux.
We assembled a team of experts to get to
the bottom of their issues. Several fire-drills, phone calls and
meetings later, we found that the Sun Fire X2200 server is a better
fit for their target application.

SmugMug wanted to standardize on
a server platform. After a set of
server reviews from various vendors, they selected
Sun as their
infrastructure supplier. Subsequently, Smugmug CEO Don MacAskill posted
a detailed blog reviewing
the benefits they are seeing from X2200.

I was thrilled to see that they
have recently done a video telling the
world why they chose Sun. Nice one, check it out.

According to the article, "Thanks to
a massive datacenter consolidation, hardware refresh, and creative,
energy-efficient facility design, Sun has reduced power capacity demand
by 75 percent at its Santa Clara, Calif., datacenter alone, saving $1.1
million per year in energy costs, while increasing its datacenter
processing power more than four times. Overall, Sun estimates
that its consolidation efforts will save 4,100 tons of CO2 per year and
cut 1 percent from its total carbon footprint."

As
Wall Street Journal reports,
IT.com found out early how these systems
can change their business...

"We have added SMP [symmetric
multiprocessing] capabilities so you can
add two of them into a single system, so within one rack unit or a
two-rack-unit-high enclosure you are going to have 128 simultaneous
compute threads," notes Sun's Mat Keep in a eWEEK interview.
"What that means in comparison
to other compatible systems is that you'll have two-and-a-half to
five
times the performance compared to a two-socket, Intel-based system
and
price
performance that is five times better."

And Alan has a nice post
on the reactions from the amped up engineers.

Let's cap it off with the best news -- our Try & Buy users
can save
up to 45% if they purchase trial units before June 30.

UPDATE: InfoWorld published a preview of the system today with the full review to come in the next couple of weeks.